It was the American writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau who surprisingly stalled the growth of North American garden writing for a good many years.

Anyone who has read Walden, Thoreau's account of his back-to-the-land experiment, will remember that nasty chapter where Thoreau decides he should grow a cash-crop bean field, only to find the earth has its own rebellious ideas. After toiling unsuccessfully for too long, Thoreau exclaims, "I would sooner live by the most dismal swamp than the most beautiful garden." And, with that, American garden literature fell victim to the Whitmanesque stuff in which man is chopped liver next to the sublime nature.

A recent book, The Greater Perfection: The Story of the Gardens at Les Quatre Vents, presents a welcome break from that tradition. This lush "autobiography of a garden," written by its dedicated owner, Francis Cabot, is an account of the transformation of Cabot's hilltop family property in Quebec's rugged Charlevoix region into one of Canada's most astounding examples of nature conquered -- one impressive enough to put most of our official botanical gardens to shame.

Since the 19th century, the La Malbaie region, in which Les Quatre Vents is situated, has remained one of the more exclusive outposts of English Protestant country life in Quebec. The area has always been a remote and untrammeled oasis for the Anglophone rich craving a bit of rough by the salty end of the St. Lawrence. It is perhaps for this reason that Les Quatre Vents -- a property purchased by Francis Cabot's great-grandfather George Bonner, brother of John Bonner, the former New York Times editor -- has remained one of this country's best-kept horticultural secrets, even though its 20 acres are open for viewing by appointment.

It was Cabot's father who first began to lay out some of the gardens with different walls, hedges and floral arrangements. But it took the obsessive passion of Francis Cabot, the former president of the New York Botanical Garden, and founder of The Garden Conservancy, an organization devoted to the preservation of exceptional private gardens in North America, to render Les Quatre Vents into the "multi-room" fantasy it is today.

Cabot's artistic vigour has been compared with that of King Ludwig II, the Mad King of Bavaria, a great builder of castles. And indeed, his touch is not light. Under his direction, a topiary area at Les Quatre Vents has been made to resemble a giant sitting room, like something out of Alice in Wonderland. Another garden room, complete with a Normandy-style pigeonnier (dovecote), contains a reflective pool plagiarized from the Taj Mahal. There is a meadow of six-foot delphiniums, fields of daisies copied from the Viceroy's Palace in New Delhi, a replica of a classic 15th-century Japanese Pavilion, ensconced in a mossy waterfall, and a Himalayan-style rope bridge spanning a 100-foot-wide ravine with a high-tech sprinkler system hidden under turf. The waterworks allow for the Chinese rhubarb and ostrich ferns visible below the rope bridge -- the sort of vegetation natural to a Nepalese cloud forest, but not a USDA Zone 4 northern outpost.

"The point of my book has been to show how a contrived landscape can fit seamlessly with the natural," says Cabot, who is now 76. "Writing about it has been important for me -- as it should be for any gardener. If a gardener doesn't write about his gardens, they will eventually be forgotten, with the first frost."

Cabot first began gardening at Stonecrop, his home in Cold Spring, New York, which has since become a public garden and teaching institution. But his horticultural odyssey at Les Quatre Vents, the summer home where he spent many a bucolic childhood day, began in the 1960s. Spending one warm season clearing horseback riding trails through some of Les Quatre Vents' untouched forest, he uncovered what he calls a "lesson in natural succession." The dense woodlands contained a fascinating range of ecology -- here were red pines, a little distance away were balsam firs, and beyond, white spruce, each of which attracted its own natural garden of mosses, wildflowers, fungi and fauna. Two centuries earlier, when La Malbaie was still a single seigneurie, the dense forest was farmland, sectioned off into long strips, each one run by different families. These mini "eco-systems" had developed from the diverse sorts of soils and crops laid by those farmers.

Discovering the historic compartmentalization of Les Quatre Vents' forest may have been the starting point for Cabot's present horticultural aesthetic -- one that is anything but homogenous and that takes the idea of different gardens and eco-systems side by side to almost delirious heights.

It's the sort of stuff that would have Whitman rolling in his grave. About this Cabot is untroubled. "To grow wonderful things, you need to give them the conditions they need," he shrugs. "Nobody has ever criticized me for it, anyway."

The sprinkler system is just one of the reasons for Cabot's apparent glee in tampering with nature, or "just helping things along," as he puts it. Beneath his garden lies an entire highway of pipes and other mechanic aids. Nor is this a gardener averse to imbuing a reflective pool with black dye for dramatic effect, or positioning giant mirrors at either side of a tulip-fringed allée.

In The Greater Perfection, Cabot recalls a charmed childhood on the grounds and the later adversities he faced in achieving his life's work. At points, he sounds almost sheepish, as he admits to the sort of up-at-night obsessions necessary to devote oneself to a vanity project that by definition is never ending. After all, says Cabot, a good garden is like a good piece of writing: "always under revision."

The Greater Perfection: The Story of the Gardens at Les Quatre Vents by Francis H. Cabot is published by W.W. Norton (Hortus Press).;

Review by Mireille Silcoff   Saturday Post 

Photographs by Scott Frances, Andrew Lawson, Virginia Weiler, Jerry Harpur, Mick Hales, Hortus Press and Richard W. Brown